Try spectre -h ic

Ah, you didn't mention that you want to know how to do it from ADE. The importance of asking the right question!

The Simulation->Convergence Aid->Initial Condition is a way of creating ic statements in the netlist, having set them up by pointing at nodes on the schematic.

The initial condition options on the transient analysis (readic, skipdc etc) are for if you have a file containing initial conditions. Doing it this way only affects the transient, whereas doing via the sim->conv->ic menu will affect all analyses (because it affects all the DC solutions), unless of course you've set the option in that analysis (ic=none - I
think that's the option off the top of my head).

Regards,

Andrew.